T remembers the terror after she was deported from the United States to El Salvador late last year. A transgender woman who asked to be identified only by her initial for safety, she says she fled nearly five years ago after repeated harassment and threats. At the Salvadoran airport, officials forced her to strip and examined her tattoos for any gang references, warning that a single mark could send her straight to CECOT, the country’s notorious maximum-security prison.
She was allowed to go to her parents’ home but was told local officers could stop and question her at any time. For a month she barely left the house, terrified of being detained again.
T’s story is not unique. A March 2026 Human Rights Watch report and reporting by NPR, together with interviews with families, attorneys and rights groups, describe hundreds of Salvadorans deported from the U.S. who vanish into El Salvador’s prison system upon arrival or in the weeks that follow. Many are held incommunicado and cut off from lawyers and relatives for months or longer.
Human Rights Watch says more than 9,000 Salvadorans have been returned from the U.S. to El Salvador since President Trump took office in January 2025. Attorneys and advocates say a large share of those deportees are rapidly detained under the Salvadoran government’s extended emergency measures.
The detentions flow from a 2022 decree by President Nayib Bukele that imposed a state of exception after a wave of gang killings. Although El Salvador’s constitution limits such emergency orders to 30 days, Bukele has repeatedly renewed the measures, effectively maintaining a police-state framework for four years. The crackdown has coincided with a sharp drop in homicides but has also produced one of the world’s highest incarceration rates and tens of thousands of arrests. Citing official data, the Spanish newspaper El País estimates nearly 92,000 arrests since 2022; it says 64 percent of those arrested had been identified as gang members by intelligence services before the emergency measures began.
Human rights organizations warn the state of exception has enabled widespread abuses, including arbitrary detention, denial of due process and mistreatment in custody. The San Salvador–based group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario reports at least 517 deaths in prisons since the emergency powers began.
The Salvadoran government has cooperated with the U.S. on immigration enforcement. Under a reported $6 million agreement, El Salvador temporarily housed hundreds of Venezuelan deportees in CECOT; many Venezuelans were later released while many Salvadoran nationals remained detained.
Families describe anguish and long silences. Jennifer Kesselberg Dubon, a U.S. citizen in Nebraska, says her husband, Salvador Eduardo Dubon Miranda, was deported in 2023 and jailed on suspicion of gang association — an allegation she rejects. He had no criminal record in the U.S., and she says she has had no contact with him since his imprisonment. “He was really scrawny when he went in there … and mentally he doesn’t do well being confined,” she told NPR. “In all honesty, he may be dead.”
Another family member, who asked to be identified as Grace, said her brother was detained when he returned in 2025. He had been charged years earlier in El Salvador with statutory rape but was acquitted in 2021. Grace says authorities have accused him of collaborating with gangs despite no evidence, and the family has not heard from him since he was processed into prison.
Attorneys and researchers say U.S. deportation decisions are complicated by information-sharing between U.S. and Salvadoran authorities. Sarah Bishop, a Baruch College professor studying post-deportation experiences, says deportees can be re-arrested because prior arrests show up in U.S. or Salvadoran databases or even on unverified suspicions of gang ties. Bishop has tracked 25 men deported from the U.S. over four years; 19 were incarcerated upon or soon after arrival.
Jonathan Levy, director of pro bono programs at immigrant-rights group American Gateways, represents several Salvadoran deportees and argues the U.S. must assess whether returnees face a real risk of torture or death. “There is evidence that some people who are sent there are only getting out deceased,” he said. Levy also warned that legal avenues to block deportations have narrowed under the Trump administration, pointing to recent Board of Immigration Appeals decisions that make it harder to prevent removals.
The Department of Homeland Security declined to answer questions about the disappearances or El Salvador’s state of exception and referred inquiries to Salvadoran authorities. A Bukele spokesperson did not respond to NPR requests regarding the abuse allegations.
For deportees who are not jailed immediately, the challenges are severe: stigma in the job market, debt to smugglers, fear of police violence and social exclusion. Many struggle to find work and remain isolated, afraid to leave their homes.
Some deportees manage to return to the U.S. through successful appeals; when U.S. courts rule in their favor, the federal government must bring them back. T has since been returned to U.S. immigration detention and is appealing her deportation order.
Human rights groups, attorneys and family members say their only realistic hope is for Bukele to restore due process in El Salvador. Without it, they say, families have little chance of learning whether deported relatives are charged, where they are held, how they are being treated — or whether they are still alive.